TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur’s JourneyThe journal of a young web entrepreneur on his journey to wealth.

An Update on My Affiliate Marketing Efforts

Oops. Apparently the last time I gave any update on my affiliate marketing efforts was way back on August 11th when I made my post: My Campaign is Starting to Pick Up.

There are several reasons for the lack of updates, but the main one is that I had been simply posting too much on affiliate marketing which quickly lead to overexposure. Therefore, this post isn’t a resurgence of an affiliate marketing theme on my blog, but rather just an update. I’ll try to give slightly more frequent updates on how many campaigns are going in the future, but not nearly as much as I used to.

Also, affiliate marketing has always just been a small side gig for me; something new for me to try. My main source of income has always come from my websites (I don’t consider my affiliate sites as actual websites…) mostly through private ads, so it’s very misleading to classify me as an affiliate marketer because I am not. At least, I don’t do affiliate marketing for a living.

Surprising Number of Fails

I promised myself that when I returned from my trip to the Philippines that I was going to give PPC affiliate marketing another try and really try to push myself. I had made a bit of money in the past, but nothing substantial. My goal was to work hard and really see what I could do.

I’m happy to say that for about 3 weeks I was working my ass off. In fact, I hadn’t worked that hard on the computer in years, if ever. I was working around 12 hours a day, which is a lot when you consider that I typically work an average of 4 hours a day.

I got a lot of work done and launched about 3 sites, but only one was getting anywhere. I then took a bit of a break to recover, and let it run for a while. A couple weeks or so later, I went back to work, nearly as hard as before, and pumped out another 3 or so campaigns. This didn’t take nearly as long as the first time since I had a system in place and roughly the same format on my websites, but writing good content and ad copy still takes quite a bit of time.

Unfortunately, all of those sites completely tanked, save for my original one. That was a bit of a blow since I was actually quite optimistic on one campaign in particular as I thought I had discovered a “goldmine” keyword during my initial research on the niche. While the keyword did prove to be awesome (brand name, 6 million clicks a month, $0.05), it didn’t convert at all, which was completely surprising to me considering the keyword.

I let my main campaign run another couple weeks, all this time slightly optimizing it (purely on keywords) once a week or so, and then tried a different line of attack. I ran some stuff (mainly rebills) on Facebook, AdBrite, and a couple other sources, which didn’t pan out. This actually cost me close to a grand unfortunately.

So in the end I tried a lot of different offers, all of which failed save for my original one (figures…). This month in November, I pretty much just let my one campaign run quietly, only optimizing it slightly twice. This was partly due to needing an emotional break from affiliate marketing, but mainly due to focusing on the big Movie-Vault.com revamp, and even more recently, my RobotWarz game.

New Daily Profit Record: $233.39

This week I saw a nice string of revenue. My campaign has quite heavy variance, meaning that it’s common, in fact normal, for me to have a couple of days in the green (black) and then a day or two in the red. This is mainly due to the fact that the offer I’m running is in the higher-paying range and therefore more susceptible to variation. For example, 3 leads can make a big difference since it’s over $100.

On November 19th, I set a new affiliate marketing personal record, netting a profit of $233.39 in a single day. As you know, I love breaking records so I was pretty happy about that.

I had expected for the weekend to drop in the low 2-digit figures, or even the red, but yesterday (Saturday) still made $76.78 and today as of noon, my campaign is currently at $67 profit.

This makes me wonder if this is just another string of positive variance, or possibly due to the Christmas season. The thing though, is that the offer I’m running is totally not the type of thing you’d give as a gift… then again, there are a lot of bad gift givers out there.

I’ll just have to wait and see how things progress.

If I Can Do It, So Can You

During the past 6 days, I generated a total of $1,270.50 at PeerFly. This works out to an average of $211.66. If we assume that I average that from November 1st to December 31st, that would total just shy of $13,000.

That would place me easily into the $10,000.00 – $19,999.99 VIP Tier in PeerFly’s Wonderful Winter Competition held at PublisherChallenge. As a result, I would have won a Canon Rebel XSi 12.2MP Digital SLR Camera… for doing nothing different other than simply running my campaign.

Unfortunately, I’m not eligible to compete in the competition due to an obvious conflict of interest running PublisherChallenge.

My point is that it’s really not that difficult to walk away with a great prize from the competitions held by PeerFly on PublisherChallenge. I consider myself a newbie affiliate marketer, but I still would have won an awesome camera.

Even if you only do $40 a day gross, you’d still win an 8GB iPod Nano. And of course we have huge prizes for affiliates that can do huge numbers.

I won’t go into this anymore, but just want to show you how easy it is to win a prize… remember, I’m only running one campaign that I barely touch.

Restructuring Plans

Since I am busy with Movie-Vault.com and RobotWarz, I’m not working on affiliate marketing at the moment. But when I do find some more time and energy, I have some plans in mind for how to scale my campaign.

First, I’m going to try a different a tracking software. I currently use Tracking202 Pro which is good, but it also has its limits. For example, I cannot track on anything other than the “big 3”, and there is vital information that I am unable to see such as country data which is crucially important for my campaign.

I could move down to the free version of Tracking202, but the guys at 202 just announced yesterday that they sold 202 to Bloomsky. I’ve always used Tracking202 largely in part because I trust Wes and the guys there, so I don’t like the fact that it was sold to an affiliate network.

Therefore, I’m probably going to try StatsJunky and see how I like it. Hopefully I’ll be able to track country data then.

Secondly, I’m going to try to port my main campaign over to Facebook. I already tried porting it to the content network, but that didn’t do all that well (it roughly breaks even).

Lastly, I am going to change the way I create and run my actual affiliate websites. The way I have it set up currently, it’s nearly impossible for me to run any split-testing on the landing pages. I am therefore thinking of changing the way I do this, and will commission for a simple script to be made by Interberry where I can easily do this in the future.

I’ve done split-testing on landing pages before, and many people will be very surprised just how much difference the tiniest change on your landing page can make to your conversion rate.

I think that with the above changes I should be able to ramp my campaign to $1,000 gross a day.

I’ll just have to wait until I have the time and patience to do all this stuff (changing tracking software will be a pain, as will changing how my site is coded…).